Twenty-Four-Hour Bookstore, and Other News

Professor Richard H. Hoggart has died, at ninety-five. In 1960, Hoggart helped to end British censorship of Lady Chatterley’s Lover; he is “widely credited as the most persuasive in convincing a jury of nine men and three women that Lawrence’s graphic descriptions of sex between Lady Constance Chatterley and her husband’s groundskeeper, Oliver Mellors, were not obscene.”

Beijing now has a twenty-four-hour bookstore. It has nightly promotional offers and air-conditioning. “We want to create an intellectual environment for book lovers,” the store’s manager said. But lest you think it sounds like paradise: “We mainly sell social science books.”

The critic Franco Moretti “pursues literary research of a digital and quantitative nature”; in other words, he handles books as if they’re mountains of data. “I’m interested in the survival of genres, of texts, of forms. I’m a formalist. I think that should be the basis of literary analysis because, I suspect, that is also the basis of readers’ choices, although readers may not be aware of that. They don’t seem to choose a story. They choose a story told in a certain way, with a certain style and sense of events.”

For Mary Gaitskill, Let’s Talk About Love, Carl Wilson’s excellent book about Céline Dion, becomes a meditation on our preoccupation with cool: our ferocious disdain for Dion suggests we live in “a world of illusory shared experiences, ready-made identities, manipulation, and masks so dense and omnipresent that in this world, an actual human face is ludicrous or ‘crazy’; a world in which authenticity is jealously held sacrosanct and yet is often unwelcome or simply unrecognizable when it appears.”